over them. In a word, these unhappy
mortals may be compared to children, in whom the development of reason is
not completed."

Now all these peculiarities, although in the unenlightened states of
Greece they would have entitled their possessors to immortal honor, as
having reduced to practice those rigid and abstemious maxims, the mere
talking about which acquired certain old Greeks the reputation of sages
and philosophers; yet were they clearly proved in the present instance to
betoken a most abject and brutified nature, totally beneath the human
character. But the benevolent fathers, who had undertaken to turn these
unhappy savages into dumb beasts by dint of argument, advanced still
stronger proofs; for as certain divines of the sixteenth century, and
among the rest Lullus, affirm, the Americans go naked, and have no beards!
"They have nothing," says Lullus, "of the reasonable animal, except the
mask." And even that mask was allowed to avail them but little, for it was
soon found that they were of a hideous copper complexion--and being of a
copper complexion, it was all the same as if they were negroes--and
negroes are black, "and black," said the pious fathers, devoutly crossing
themselves, "is the color of the devil!" Therefore, so far from being able
to own property, they had no right even to personal freedom--for liberty
is too radiant a deity to inhabit such gloomy temples. All which
circumstances plainly convinced the righteous followers of Cortes and
Pizarro that these miscreants had no title to the soil that they
infested--that they were a perverse, illiterate, dumb, beardless,
black-seed--mere wild beasts of the forests and, like them, should either
be subdued or exterminated.

From the foregoing arguments, therefore, and a variety of others equally
conclusive, which I forbear to enumerate, it is clearly evident that this
fair quarter of the globe, when first visited by Europeans, was a howling
wilderness, inhabited by nothing but wild beasts; and that the
transatlantic visitors acquired an incontrovertible property therein, by
the right of discovery.

This right being fully established, we now come to the next, which is the
right acquired by cultivation. "The cultivation of the soil," we are told,
"is an obligation imposed by nature on mankind. The whole world is
appointed for the nourishment of its inhabitants; but it would be
incapable of doing it, was it uncultivated. Every nation is then obliged
by